Bert Burykill

After ten years of being either in prison or on parole, our prison correspondent finally has the government off of his back—no more parole office waiting rooms, no more piss tests, no more check-ins from the Man.

I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours rapping, talking about rap, and listening to cassette tapes when I was an inmate. Without Ol' Dirty Bastard, Kool Keith, and Bootsy Collins, I really would have gone insane.

When I went to jail ten years ago I knew it'd be tough. Many people told me that I'd ruined my life, but how could I accept that when I was only 23? Today it's become much more of a reality, but I refuse to throw in the towel just yet.

The most ridiculous notion civilians have about the legal system is that the accused are "innocent until proven guilty." Actually, thanks to high bails and other absurdities, you can spend a long time in jail before anyone convicts you of any wrongdoing…

I've met too many dudes in jail who've been locked up their entire lives. Once you get in trouble as a kid you get put in the system and end up in group homes and other tough places where you just learn how to do more bad shit—it's a tough cycle to break…

Inmates generally come from the city but get locked up in rural prisons—and that means in many states, they're counted as residents of these podunk towns and counties, giving those communities more political power.

You probably know who Sheriff Joe is—he's been the most "controversial" figure in American law enforcement for two decades, which is a nice way to say he's a vicious, small-minded, publicity-hungry cocksucker.

Gun violence in a huge problem in a lot of bad neighborhoods, but sometimes, aggressive antigun laws just end up putting people who never had any intention of committing a violent crime in prison for long-ass periods of time. At least, that's what happene…

Everyone's writing open letters to Miley Cyrus, even prison inmates like Sexx Money—he might get his pop culture news way later than everyone else, but he wants everyone to know how much he loves Miley.

Thanks to an article about my arrest for drugs in 2004, when employers google my real name they think I'm some kinda kingpin and don't hire me, which is making it much, much harder to join the world as a legitimate citizen.

Curtis Snow is a former stickup kid and D-boy who got famous for his pseudo-docudrama Snow on tha Bluff, an extremely raw look at one of America's roughest neighborhoods. He's now trying to be a legit…

Anthony Curcio was football star in high school with a charmed life, but got addicted to pills so bad that he tried to rob an armored car through an elaborate heist. Five years later, he's out of prison and creating children's books.

Inmates in California just ended their hunger strike against conditions in solitary confinement after two months, and the fact that they starved themselves for that long as a protest shows you how cruel and unusual prisons' shit has gotten.

The FCC has finally put a cap on how much inmates can be charged for out-of-state calls, which is gonna provide some relief for prisoners and their families who were getting robbed blind by predatory companies like Global Tel Link.

Orange Is the New Black is a damn good show about prison. It's based on Piper Kerman's memoir, which she wrote after spending some time in the clink-clink, and actually her story is similar to mine—we were both living upper-middle-class lives befor…

I received a particularly desperate letter last week. I won't provide too many of the details 'cause the case is still going on but it appears the feller did some real rapist shit on a young girl—he says it was consensual, but when a girl is so young, the…

Other than getting some bonerable melon, there wasn't anything good about spending Independence Day in prison. It was another ugly reminder that us inmates were missing out on the real world. Anyone we talked to outside was going to tell us about the part…

It seems to me like they always pick on the people who are already down when it comes to intrusive nonsense like mandatory drug testing, so the criminals got it first, but it's becoming more apparent to me that this is a big hustle, and it's not just for…